The Image of Non-Jews in a Text by Abramovitch: A Close Reading of The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third

In the nineteenth-century European literary tradition the Jew is represented as 'the Other'. The general image is a stereotypical description of the Jew as a parasite, a sorcerer or a villain. Even when one can specify and set down the linguistic, geographical and historical circumstances in which particular novels and stories were written, many of them incorporate the figure of 'the Jew' as a construct that plays a particular role in the narrative.1 Alongside the development of the European fiction, within the Jewish literary context, the new-Hebrew and Yiddish literatures are born and mature. The writers simultaneously bring in distinct features characteristic of the Jewish background, languages and context, while they also look towards European literary models and pattern their prose, to some extent, on the European style